Police Records

Author(s):  
Cristina Vatulescu

This chapter approaches police records as a genre that gains from being considered in its relationships with other genres of writing. In particular, we will follow its long-standing relationship to detective fiction, the novel, and biography. Going further, the chapter emphasizes the intermedia character of police records not just in our time but also throughout their existence, indeed from their very origins. This approach opens to a more inclusive media history of police files. We will start with an analysis of the seminal late nineteenth-century French manuals prescribing the writing of a police file, the famous Bertillon-method manuals. We will then track their influence following their adoption nationally and internationally, with particular attention to the politics of their adoption in the colonies. We will also touch briefly on the relationship of early policing to other disciplines, such as anthropology and statistics, before moving to a closer look at its intersections with photography and literature.

2017 ◽  
pp. 127-165
Author(s):  
Erika Balsom

This chapter examines the history of the predominant model for the distribution of artists’ moving image today. This chapter traces out the history of this distribution model from the late nineteenth century to the present and offers hypotheses concerning its steps towards success in the 1990s. It explores the relationship between the limited edition model and the rental model of the cooperatives, outlines the various criticisms this artificial rarity has provoked, and discusses the possible benefits it might have for artists and collectors.


2003 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 531-559 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. L. HIGHAM

Few historians of anthropology and missionary work examine the relationship of Protestant missionaries with nineteenth-century anthropologists and its effect on anthropological portrayals of Indians. This paper poses the question: Does it make a difference that early anthropologists in Canada and the United States also worked as Protestant missionaries or relied on Protestant missionaries for data? Answering yes, it shows how declining support for Indian missions led missionaries to peddle their knowledge of Indians to scholarly institutions. These institutions welcomed missionaries as professionals because of their knowledge, dedication, and time in the field. Such relationships helped create a transnational image of the Indian in late nineteenth-century North American anthropology.


Genre ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-149
Author(s):  
Matthew John Phillips

Following Henry James, literary-critical practices presume the autonomy and integrity of the literary text. The roman à clef meanwhile troubles this autonomy by presuming a transparent and concrete relation between text and world. By turning to the late nineteenth-century writer Vernon Lee, who elevates reference as a vital principle of all literary representation, this essay argues that the roman à clef challenges our assumptions about the value of reference. Lee’s novel Miss Brown (1884), a roman à clef about British aestheticism, is treated as a privileged case study for reading this alternative history of the novel. By focusing on the provisionality of literature, which Lee calls a “half-art,” this essay argues that literature’s reference to an external context provides a point of departure for thinking about women’s disempowerment and vulnerability in late nineteenth-century British culture. At the same time, it argues that provisionality offers a model for considering the broader consequences of limitation and determination in the history of the novel.


2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (5) ◽  
pp. 0-0
Author(s):  
Olga Yablonska

This paper analizes O. Kobylanska’s story “Vals mèlancolque” as the epicenter of the writers’ refl ections on the category of harmony and happiness. The relationship of O. Kobylanska’s spiritual quest in «Diary» and short prose of the late nineteenth century is observed (“Nature”, “Rose”, “Ignorant”, “Vals mèlancolque”, “Humility”, etc.). The author’s vision of the substantial role of art and words in the story “Vals mèlancolque” is highligted. This paper also investigates the symbolist nature of a text. The writer emphasizes the understanding of the actual idea of women’s emancipation. The paper shows that female characters embody the author’s conscious distinction of such categories as “love” (Martha), “cold art” (Anna) and a harmonious combination of “pieces” and “love” (Sofi a). It is concluded that in the work of Kobylanska the text is a landmark, being both a kind of life and artistic credo.


2004 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 565-598 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bryan Gilliam

In the context of the most prolific and tumultuous decade in Strauss's life, the 1930s, this essay focuses on the years 1935-36, a time of significant change in the history of the Nazi regime. This period also saw significant changes in Strauss's life and worldview. Strauss lost a prized librettist (Stefan Zweig) in 1935, the same year that their opera, Die schweigsame Frau, was banned. Strauss was then fired from the presidency of the Reichsmusikkammer and within twenty-four hours was negotiating reluctantly with a new librettist of modest abilities (Joseph Gregor). On a broader level, this period saw the formation of the Nuremberg Race Laws, a reconfiguration of the Reichskulturkammer, and Hitler's four-year plan for war. As the Nazis expanded, Strauss grew inward, turning to his late nineteenth-century roots in German Romanticism and Innerlichkeit informed by Goethe and Nietzsche. The relationship between Strauss's public and private worlds is explored through discussions of his completed works as well as a fragmentary cello concerto and works for male chorus in a sketchbook from this time.


1977 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis D. Cordell

The caravan route linking Benghazi and Wadai was probably the most important avenue of long-distance trade between the Mediterranean and the eastern Sudan in the late nineteenth century. It remained economically viable well after 1900, after commerce on routes further west had declined.Beginning with the Mejabra trader from Jālū who first found a direct route from Cyrenaica to Wadai in 1809 or 1810, this article traces the history of the route in the nineteenth century with special reference to the effects of Wadaian policies on trans-Saharan commerce. The important role of the Mejabra and Zūwāyā merchants from Libya is also considered.Fluctuating fortunes characterized trading activity along the route between its opening and the years after 1850. Beginning in the 1860s, however, commercial prospects improved steadily. Evidence suggests that the Sanūsīya Muslim brotherhood (ṭarīqa) was largely responsible for increased trade and prosperity along the route at this time. Because the order spanned the route's entire length, it solved many of the problems connected with long-distance commerce. It assured regular communication, relatively rapid transport, the creation of bonds of trust, a system of adjudication and arbitration, and an all-embracing structure of authority to maintain order and respect for judicial rulings. It functioned as a trading diaspora, but its members were not all of the same ethnic group. Rather, adherence to a single ṭarāqa bound merchants together and fostered the security necessary for the trade. The article concludes that the relationship between the brotherhood and commerce was symbiotic. The Sanūsīya sheltered commerce; in turn, the caravan trade brought wealth to the order and united its far-flung domains.


2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxwell Uphaus

The burgeoning subfield of literary oceanic studies has largely neglected modernist literature, maintaining that the end of the age of sail in the late nineteenth century also marks an end to maritime literature's substantive cultural role. This essay outlines a way of reading the maritime in modernism through an analysis of the engagement with history and temporality in Joseph Conrad's sea novel The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897). The novel depicts the sea as variously an anachronistic sphere left behind by history, an integral foundation to history, an element that eclipses history, and an archive of history's repressed violence. This article traces the interactions of these various views of the sea's relationship to history, highlighting how they are shaped and inflected by the novel's treatment of race. Based on this analysis, it proposes an approach to the sea in modernist literature that focuses on its historiographical rather than social import.


2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-135
Author(s):  
Giles Whiteley

Walter Pater's late-nineteenth-century literary genre of the imaginary portrait has received relatively little critical attention. Conceived of as something of a continuum between his role as an art critic and his fictional pursuits, this essay probes the liminal space of the imaginary portraits, focusing on the role of the parergon, or frame, in his portraits. Guided by Pater's reading of Kant, who distinguishes between the work (ergon) and that which lies outside of the work (the parergon), between inside and outside, and contextualised alongside the analysis of Derrida, who shows how such distinctions have always already deconstructed themselves, I demonstrate a similar operation at work in the portraits. By closely analysing the parerga of two of Pater's portraits, ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’ (1887) and ‘Apollo in Picardy’ (1893), focusing on his partial quotation of Goethe in the former, and his playful autocitation and impersonation of Heine in the latter, I argue that Pater's parerga seek to destabilise the relationship between text and context so that the parerga do not lie outside the text but are implicated throughout in their reading, changing the portraits constitutively. As such, the formal structure of the parergon in Pater's portraits is also a theoretical fulcrum in his aesthetic criticism and marks that space where the limits of, and distinctions between, art and life become blurred.


2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 719-779
Author(s):  
David Gutkin

H. Lawrence Freeman's “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” Voodoo, was premiered in 1928 in Manhattan's Broadway district. Its reception bespoke competing, racially charged values that underpinned the idea of the “modern” in the 1920s. The white press critiqued the opera for its allegedly anxiety-ridden indebtedness to nineteenth-century European conventions, while the black press hailed it as the pathbreaking work of a “pioneer composer.” Taking the reception history of Voodoo as a starting point, this article shows how Freeman's lifelong project, the creation of what he would call “Negro Grand Opera,” mediated between disparate and sometimes apparently irreconcilable figurations of the modern that spanned the late nineteenth century through the interwar years: Wagnerism, uplift ideology, primitivism, and popular music (including, but not limited to, jazz). I focus on Freeman's inheritance of a worldview that could be called progressivist, evolutionist, or, to borrow a term from Wilson Moses, civilizationist. I then trace the complex relationship between this mode of imagining modernity and subsequent versions of modernism that Freeman engaged with during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through readings of Freeman's aesthetic manifestos and his stylistically syncretic musical corpus I show how ideas about race inflected the process by which the qualitatively modern slips out of joint with temporal modernity. The most substantial musical analysis examines leitmotivic transformations that play out across Freeman's jazz opera American Romance (1924–29): lions become subways; Mississippi becomes New York; and jazz, like modernity itself, keeps metamorphosing. A concluding section considers a broader set of questions concerning the historiography of modernism and modernity.


This chapter reviews the book Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America: Identity Transitions in the New Odessa Jewish Commune, Odessa, Oregon, New York, 1881–1891 (2014), by Theodore H. Friedgut, together with Israel Mandelkern, Recollections of a Communist (edited and annotated by Theodore H. Friedgut). Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America is a two-in-one volume that explores an obscure episode in the history of the Jews in the late nineteenth century while at the same time connecting much of its content to the author’s own life experience as a son of western Canada’s Jewish farming colonies and, later, as an ideologically driven halutz on an Israeli kibbutz. Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America retells one branch of the mostly forgotten history of the Am Olam agricultural movement and brings a new layer into the discussion of global Jewish agrarianism, while Recollections of a Communist offers an edited and annotated version of a memoir written by Mandelkern.


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